CBC Radio Nerdz VIII

She's been instructed to try to bring Barbara's humour to the program...poor woman.

Some right-wing anti-Arab bigot was just on Day Six, heaping criticism upon the UN for the Security Council vote.  I was so mad I felt like sending off a sternly-worded letter to the CBC.  Then Brent Bambury came on and said that the yahoo was Ezra Levant.

OK, that makes sense.

[Should there be a "Pro-Zionist media bias/CBC Radio nerds" thread?]

i heard that too. Ezrah Levant. nazipooh and loudmouth snake oil salesman!  Brent banbury ENCOURAGES us to visit the program website, to 'comment' pro or con, he says, as if the hits aint the main idea ( he sure doesn't gives a flying frick about what anybody thinks)...john bolton is ALWAYS on jon oakley, the am640 morning skinhead host, to succor the mindless idiots who listen to jon oakley/stafford/doyle etc. Btw, Mike Bullard is on CFRB at noon (Beyond the Mike)  and he is a breath of fresh air! Will wonders never cease! He had Carolyn Parrish on last week to comment on the mayor hazel bs the rest of media somehow overlooks! I fear telling steve kouch, 'RB program director, that Mike is a step in right direction as ...well, reactionaries are truly vicious, and Mike Bullard seems to like twisting the skinheads' tails! The contempt between him and reactionary aftnoon host jim richards almost grabs throats! For example, Mike said richards has the 'sweetest ass at the station' when richards was leaving the  onair booth after doing the show intro interview! ...shades of fallen talkradio hero Alan Berg! (maybe also a reference to the Family Guy Peter Griffin(!)?)

hahaha! take that, ya skinhead bastards!

Neat read here on the overall CBC operations, Stursberg, etc. 

Interesting to note the almost total emphasis on CBC TV and just a few offhand comments on Ceeb Radio 1, which is clearly still capable of servicing its mandate even though we hack on it constantly.

Couple of trends of note that Rabinovitch is, I think, totally correct in pointing out: CBC sports is toast, and TV newscasts are not long for the screens, especially a big daily and mostly pointless program like The National, which must costs scads of money to produce each day. 

Why not adopt the radio format for TV?  Put CBC News Network on the channels, and break it up with hourly newscasts from your particular region.  Consolidate the operations, because I don't think there's any justification for big splashy newscasts anymore, especially ones that are reliant upon stories not sourced locally.

And this sounds mean, but oh well....  Axe the dinosaurs in front of and behind the cameras and microphones.  Pension them off, force them into retirement unless they have really good skillsets.  Turn them into trainers, or unleash them on the colleges and universities as teachers.  Let them retire to fat PR paychecks.   

Thorin (or anyone else outside TO chime in) what're the Windsor TV casts like?  I have never, ever, watched a regional CBC newscast so I have no clue what they're like.

Here's the link:

 http://tinyurl.com/RabinovitchSeesTheEnd

The Chretien Libs knocking 450 mil off the budget couldn't have helped his CBC tenure much.

There's no chance that the CBC budget will increase.  Not through parliament. 

The people running the Ceeb are going to have to design a new template.  Reading the Rabinovitch interview gives me a good idea of where the Ceeb is heading whether it wants to or not - reduced TV programming in news and current affairs, no sports, radio remaining more or less the same if not enhanced, plus probably more straight to the net media.  More radio on TV.

Notice lately that the audio on As It Happens has been clear?  Skype.  The show will still do phone interviews to retain the classic sound (and not everyone they want to talk to will have net\skype) but AIH is a good indication of how the Ceeb will tweak radio to make it stronger and more video friendly. 

Now they just need to get rid of Ambrose. 

I've always been puzzled by the CBC in our general area, Thorin.  It makes more sense, to me at least, to consolidate the London and Windsor operations into one bureau covering London to Windsor (if Woodstock\Brantford is added, that's probably more than a million people).  Keep the current people in London, but add a camera operator\editor and file TV for Windsor casts, and pull London content into the Windsor morning radio show and newscasts (is there an afternoon show from Windsor radio?).

But I can see why this won't happen: some Ceebers in Toronto would either have to move to Windsor or lose their jobs creating the rather dull and lifeless Ontario Morning, with its absurd coverage mandate.

I was SO pissed at the CBC on municipal election night.  Obviously there was no coverage of London and surrounding areas, but my local 93.5 Ceeb station, which carries Toronto's afternoon show Here and Now and a lot of other Toronto coverage.... did NOT run the TO election coverage!  They did the usual and replayed The Current and other assorted programs.  So in this area we get to listen to Toronto programming for the afternoon but not when an election is happening.  Wonderful work to the programming morons at Fort Dork.

That's what I'm getting at: consolidate London and Windsor (but keep the broadcasting ops running in Windsor) to make both better and perhaps draw attention back to the Ceeb, especially radio, as a medium where news and information is discussed rationally and balanced.

London has much more in common with Windsor than Toronto.  The London region, St Thomas etc, is similar in makeup to Windsor.  It makes sense to me to combine the two operations, but with the bureau remaining in Windsor.  There's no reason for the silo treatment, and it does a disservice to the Ceeb's mandate. 

Combining the two operations would also strengthen the case for not dropping either.  London used to have a radio department of seven or eight people.  There used to be a St Thomas producer.  Now there are two news people and one part time London producer contributing to a show that's created in Toronto.  I'd much rather have the scant Ceeb resources go to supporting a London presence in Windsor than slopping more TO schlubs on the airwaves.

Back to radio.  The Rob Ford interview on AIH was a classic.  I think Off was provoking him, but whatever.  I don't think Ford is going to lose a lot of sleep over the CBC, and he'll probably be happy to join the ranks of people slamming the Ceeb.

And it looks like Ambrose is a fixture on AIH.  Sigh.  She's getting better....? 

Michael Enright is reporting on the Teaparty movement all of this morning out of Gainesville (Gaynesville?) Florida.

What one hears is an attack on liberal and socialists and a call for a return to fiscal responsibility and "constitutiional values."

And when Michael points out that Bush outspent them all...yes," we were asleep" :) 

The GAinesville food bank handled 3 million pounds of food last year...probably have to find 4 million this year...somewhere.

Quote:

When 'Enleft' (as someone renamed Michael recently!) reacted to a guest mentioning the 911 attack by suggesting the USA then attacked an innocent nation, the rightwing nut shooed away the insolent truth and insisted (paraphrasing) the attack was 'by arabs and as iraq= arab, then...etc'.

I heard some of that interview. At one point, while trying to justify invading Iraq by saying Iraqis were still shooting at murricans, she actually said "duh" - and not ironically - in the middle of her sputtering diatribe.

Enright next interviewed people involved in the Quiet Revolution and its development, representing the arts, academe and politics.

Eighty year old Jacques Parizeau was interviewed by phone from his home in Montreal...and listeners learned that the young economics grad (London School of Economics) was phoned on a Sunday morning in 1961 by Rene Levesque with the assignment (he was given three of four days) to estimate the cost of nationalizing hydro in Quebec.  Bankers in Montreal and Toronto were not about to ante up, so the money was found in New York.

The age of Globalization has complicated things, he says, but still believes that the goal of separatists is realizeable.  There are still too many workers in Quebec in the $20,000 to $30,000 income range...

In the third hour, Enright looks at the Yukon gold rush of the late 1890s and the characters that have come down to us through history.

Tarek Fatah does evening show with cfrb reactionarky knuckledragger named 'ron doyle'...he use to be on with afternoon chump mike ('we defenseless west/israel MUST use nukes on IRAN asap or we'll be very sorry!' -TO.Sun/2006!) coren until coren got let go. Coren once wrote bits for the afflict-the-comfortable 'Frank' magazine fyi! Mister Fatah can't have many muslim friends- he literally calls the religion a monstrosity of pure evil- intent on enslaving everybody to a crude and impractical prophet of a biker type god. His success, despite the obvious pandering to some murderously capable forces (US/Israel/Canada fascism) seem too much a stretch, but he is a voice of 'the other'in a skinhead media. And that's his job. ISLAM is needed by the military industrial complex (fascism)  we spend such insane sums on to secure our safety. W/out ISLAM, the enemy would be....ahem, poor lil 3rd world entities like Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, N Korea- and maybe Syria if one wants them to sound greater. China isn't poor lil 3rd world, and only serves the MIC as enemy in a too highly speculative fashion; sorta nudge wink, and that won't do! We need provable ENEMIES who are at work fighting against us, (toronto 18, shoebomber, times square blastic cap guy etc) and THEM planning horrors only Hollywood can really portray (ie mushroom clouds, anyone?) ...never mind that the State of New York has larger military budget then Cuba, iran, Venezuela and NKorea combined!  The need for an enemy is so great the CSIS might very well allow turbaned crazies to sit on the NATSEC oversight committee boards- why not? they can't do anything, and it gives the critics of western liberalism an excuse to point at how all our tough guys are terrified of being called racists! And handcuffed by the laws...

Well done Tarek. hahaha

btw, sorry about dissing Jeffrey Simpson. He is so much the George Will style that lumping him in with rightwing seems on automatic -and i haven't seen that much of Simpson since the impeach clinton days...plus i don't use or consume the bush crap they call newspapers anymore

I agree with you, Thorin-bane. While I'm sure Enright and team think of themselves as serious small-l liberals, I find the show right-leaning both in Enright's line of questioning and in the choice of guests on the show (although that's often the producer's choice, not the host's). Political perception in Canada has shifted moved so far right that even those on the centre-right such as Enright are perceived by the public -- and think of themselves -- as progressive.  A deplorable situation. For a couple of years there, Enright seemed to do nothing but interview dinosaurs such as Margaret Macmillan, Barry Cooper, Preston Manning, etc. ad nauseum, and, looking like abject dummies, the show's team completely missed the looming economic crash of 2008, which it had been warned about well in advance by such listeners as myself. I often have had to turn my radio off in dismay.

If the small-c conservative public thinks programming on CBC such as "Sunday Morning" is so damned "liberal", one should ask why intellectual and vanguard documentarists/writers/activists/intelligentsia such as Pilger, Pinter (now of course dead), Chomsky, Paul Roberts, Catherine Austin Fitz, Tariq Ali, Nader, Hedges, Heinberg, Naomi Klein, Le Carre, Parenti, etc. -- not to mention the plethora of lesser-known but socially-aware and environmentally-committed unionists and academics from universities and left-wing think tanks across North America -- are rarely or never heard.

George Victor wrote:

...

Pinning the label of centre-right on Michael Enright, and dissing one of the few programs with any historical detail,  demonstrates the depth of political ignorance in old Canuckistan, and gives cause for despair.

- actually, the reverse of that is the case - trying to deny the general center-right stance of the CBC these days, with no real exceptions including Enright, would indidate the ignorance of most Cdns these days as to just how far to the right the entire political debate has been pushed these last 30 years. It's been a slow but steady decline for formerly center-left sorts like the CBC, but at some point during the last 10-15 years or so they definitely and completely crossed the line. Enright was kind of a living god in his days with Alan Maitland on As It Happens in the 70s and early 80s - but he seems stuck in those days, whilst the world has changed around him without him really realising it from his upper-managerial position. I wouldn't speak against him, he does indeed do a lot of good stuff still on his show - but I wouldn't speak for him anymore either, in terms of current relevance concerning anything really important. He seems to have a kind of touching belief that things today are as they were 30 years ago, in terms of the integrity of the system in general, which is simply not the case anymore. And he is not above some pretty shallow promotion of rightwing/neocon positions - I couldn't believe it last year or whenever it was the Ontario referendum was on PR when I heard him saying it was 'too difficult' for him to understand. He is not that stupid, there's nothing complicated about the idea of a party getting X% ov the vote getting X% of the seats, as opposed to the completely out-of-whack results FPTP gives us, so it was obvious he was shilling for somebody6.

And aside from that, outwest's final paragraph is the cruncher - why not deal with this, GV?:

"...If the small-c conservative public thinks programming on CBC such as "Sunday Morning" is so damned "liberal", one should ask why intellectual and vanguard documentarists/writers/activists/intelligentsia such as Pilger, Pinter (now of course dead), Chomsky, Paul Roberts, Catherine Austin Fitz, Tariq Ali, Nader, Hedges, Heinberg, Naomi Klein, Le Carre, Parenti, etc. -- not to mention the plethora of lesser-known but socially-aware and environmentally-committed unionists and academics from universities and left-wing think tanks across North America -- are rarely or never heard..."

Where are the *real* lefties and progressives such as these, GV, who really speak for the people, on the "lefty" CBC these days? Almost never to be heard, and the rare time one of them does get a bit of time, it's either very controlled or the interviewer is very hostile to ensure no discordant words disturb the passive Cdn from their belief in how great we are.

Enright is ok in his own limited way, but he is no longer relevant in terms of progressivism of any sort.

And believe me, I say that with regret and sadness.

George, asking me to suffer through entire interviews with guests I've heard before and whom I consider to be shallow, illogical, and/or dishonest thinkers is akin to asking you to listen to hate-mongerers and jingoists on your favorite right-wing talk radio station in the name of "fairness" and being able to "judge them competently." I might do it once in a while to keep abreast of what the other side is saying, and usually listen to the whole interview of anyone new, but I won't do it every single day. I've lived long enough to know when I'm listening to a crock or not.

More importantly, my point is that Enright comes across as smooth-tongued progressive, but all too often his chosen guests foist what I consider to be regressive ideology on listeners, thus creating yet another obstacle to helping educate the citizenry. (I will say, however, that since the onset of the recession, his show has been improving somewhat. Perhaps his producers decided they made themselves look pretty foolish with guests who didn't have a clue what was happening when TSHTF.)

"Enright is ok in his own limited way, but he is no longer relevant in terms of progressivism of any sort."

Progressivism, used as a catchall and increasingly meaningless concept - divorced from anything that the general public would understand, let alone appreciate - marks the descent of communication among "progressives" into pure prattle.

kathleen, I still love Ideas for the most part. But I was seriously disgusted that they invited Margaret Somerville to do a Massey Lecture.

Anna Maria Tremonti kind of lost it this morning on The Current. She practically barked at her interview guest, Omar Jamal. He is the First Secretary with Somalia's Mission to the United Nations.

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2010/11/17/nov-1710---pt-3-piracy-t...

kathleen wrote:

How about Ideas? My once, and still at times, favourite cbc radio show. And now on The Massey Lectures, a novel read by author Douglas Coupland. I couldn't listen to it. And the promotion admits it was to attract a new, younger, hipper demographic. Is Douglas Coupland still young and hip - and new?

Anybody listen? Anybody bother any more?

Coupland said he would never read a novel that didn't have a telephone in it.  And CBC gives him a Massey Lecture.  On a par with cutting classical music out of the broadcast repertory.  Thank God for NPR internet streaming (check out KUSC).

Coupland also wrote the Marshall McLuhan entry for the Penguin's Extraordinary Canadian series.  It was basically juvenile drivel.  From what, a 45 year old man (how old is Coupland)?  There were pages and pages in the book that were nothing more than the results of running the words "Marshall McLuhan" through an internet anagram generator.  I kid you not.

Carol Off is about to interview Liz May in Cancun...who will explain, apparently, why Canada is again rated the dreck.

So, all that nonsense about needing to show Budd the door so that they could replace her with a journalist wasn't true? I'm shocked.

Whata fucking crock of shit! Time for a bring back Budd movement.